


This, unfortunately, is podracing

by creatorRunning



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Podracing (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:22:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27690650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatorRunning/pseuds/creatorRunning
Summary: Don't sacrifice yourself on the altar of a potential success.
Kudos: 1





	This, unfortunately, is podracing

Magestrim twitched, waking herself up. She did that a lot, nowadays. The wires spliced into her veins shocked her sometimes. She had quite a resistance, now, but if a big one would arc up her body, it’d catch her unawares.

She groaned, groggy, and opened her eyes. Eyelids and camera shutters flickered, light pouring in, discrete packets of information lighting up her brain (implant; perception of extravisible light). She’d long since gotten rid of smell, and she could feel pain, but not much else (rerouted smell as sight; detail perception enhanced). The ventilator in her chest wheezed (10% lighter than human lungs, 0.1% lighter pod overall).

She felt like she’d been thrown about, though it’d probably been her own tossing and turning. It was a good thing she couldn’t smell, since the wires made it difficult to get into the shower.

There was no point trying to get back to sleep, now, she was up and that was it. Shaking hands made a cup of rekka, downed in about two seconds. She waited for the stimulant mix to kick in. She groaned as they hit her bloodstream, and suddenly the dull colours and sounds burst back into technicolour.

She checked the time. 23%. She had another 10% before anybody would be up- roughly two hours, Galactic Coruscant Time.

The click-click-click of her ventilator ramped up as the stimulants spread through her bloodstream. The longest anybody had survived drinking rekka stimulants was twelve years- the longest human had only gotten seven. She was in year four. But the further along you were, the more effective they were. Some of the greatest feats of sports had been done hours before massive cardiac arrest. Magestrim reckoned that she would last longer- no heart, no lungs. Most of her heavier organs had been replaced with lightweight alternatives. The electrical wires and tubing made food more of a side thing than a necessity. She could feel herself decaying, sure, but that didn’t matter.

Magestrim dragged herself out of her house. Only the smaller sun was out so early, so she wasn’t in any danger of burning, even though she was as pale as the bleached sand outside. Her podracer lay outside, and even to Mag’s biased eyes, it looked a sorry sight. She’d shaved metal off, and spliced herself into the machine years ago.

Only one human had ever won a serious podracer tournament, and he’d gone on to prove he was superhuman. No point hoping a human could compete on the level of any number of the species that dominated the leaderboards. Not without help.

Mag set her mouth in a grim line. That’s why she was doing this. The achievement that would be the first human in a hundred years to top the leaderboards or win even just one race. Any sacrifice would be worth it. She lay a thin, pale arm over her dashboard, and put her head to the rickety sides. She swore she could hear the hum of electricity from the pod in her bones, but she might just be feeling the electricity flowing through _her_ body instead.

Her mechanical insides clicked and whirred, and her bones ached. For all the exotic drugs across the galaxy, and of all the stuff available in the outer rim where laws were less than suggestions, it was plain old alcohol that had her hooked. She schlepped towards the _Emperor’s Nose_. It had a real ‘authentic human’ feel to it, from a distant memory of culture thousands of years gone. Most of the patrons were like her. They needed something to slow themselves down between races. She was the most wired up out of all of them, something she took some pride in.

She ordered a vodka and looked around. The literal hole in the ground reeked of desperation, and even without functioning nasal passages, she thought she caught the whiff of alcohol and decay. Another podracer KJ-S shuffled to the bar, leaning heavily on a nutrients bag. She could tell he was days away from keeling over. He grunted in greeting to her. “We don’t serve your kind here,” he drawled slowly.

She rolled her eyes with a doped-up grin. “Until I trip the droid scanner, I’m staying put.”

“Podrace today,” he said, resting heavily on the bar. Mag nodded.

“Big daay,” she replied, drawing the last syllable out as she slammed back the vodka. Her insides started whining in protest, her metallic liver and kidneys demanding more power off the grid. “Oh, woah,” she mumbled as her arms went weak. It was a good kind of weak, where the electrical power receded from her brain for a second, rerouted away to her pumps and filters. For a blessed second, the whirring in her stomach subtracted from the whirring in her brain. She dragged a hand through her dry, split hair. KJ laughed weakly at all this, squeezing something that looked sort of like a lime into his glass.

“Hell yeah.” He sounded just as weakly. “Good luuuuck,” he finished, copying her as he tried to unscrew the bottle of tonic the bartender had handed him.

At a table behind them, someone coughed, a real hacking. Someone else muttered something and the rest of the table laughed. Mag didn’t bother looking back- too much effort.

“Uh.” KJ held out his bottle. “lil help?” He grinned, even more lopsided than she was. She took the bottle from him, and tried turning it a few times. Eventually she got it, and KJ’s distracted smile lit back up, refocussed on her as the hiss of escaping air broke the small silence that had crept in. Somewhere between the screws and pneumatics, Mag though she might feel a few butterflies at that smile.

“Thanki,” he murmured, sloshing some tonic into his glass, but spilling some of it on the bar. The bartender sighed, and pried the plastic bottle from his hand, already grabbing a rag.

They both watched the bartender for a minute, and a small “woa” dropped from Mag’s mouth as he tucked the bottle away and wiped down the table at the same time. As his two top hands lifted their glasses and the bottom two wiped the bar, KJ turned back to Mag. “God, having four arms must be soo coool,” he murmured. Mag mumbled her assent. The Besalisk bartender was used to this- hell, bartending wasn’t a job you got into if you didn’t have a resistance to drunk-people babble. Still, she thought she could see a reluctant smile on his face as he set the drinks back down and turned to serve another customer.

Magestrim stood, unsteadily, and offered a hand to KJ-S. He took it graciously, and she helped pull him out of his seat. They walked out of the dank hovel, KJ checking his watch laboriously. “It’s, uh,” he wheezed, the short walk already winding him. “Just gone 30%. Wanna watch the second sunrise?” Mag grinned a little, feeling the butterflies return in force.

“Sure,” she grinned. “I mean. If you want to.” She glanced over at him.

He grinned lopsidedly back at her. “Sure.”

They lay down on the warming ground, heads resting against the packed sandstone bricks of the _Emperor’s Nose_.

“Who’ll win the next podrace d’y’think?” Mag asked. She didn’t care so much about the answer, more just hearing it from him. He made a noncommittal noise.

“Probably the one with the fastest pod?” He suggested.

Through the fog of whatever alcohol had gotten past her liver, it took her a second to get the joke. “Wh- eheheh.” Her convulsions pushed her body up and down on the sand. “That’s good,” she murmured, her eyes drifting shut with a smile. “The fastest pod. You’re hilarious.”

When she opened her eyes, she saw his hand had snuck onto the sand beside hers, shyly. Or maybe the jerkiness was just due to the fact they’d both hollowed themselves out and replaced as much as possible with machinery. She reached for it. Her system had better heat exhausts, so her hand was chilled, where his was warmer than the slowly-heating sand around them. She hummed as she threaded her fingers through his.

“What about you,” KJ asked sleepily.

“Oh, it’ll be me, for sureee. No doubt about it.” She grinned, lifting their joined hands up momentarily and spreading her fingers. “Top five at least.”

For all the talk at every table of being the next human to claim top spot, nobody was able to even breach top five, though they’d gotten close. She felt close, though. Just two races ago, she’d got seventh. That was pretty good!

“Hell yeah.” He nodded, as he clicked away at his nutrients bag for some breakfast. “Hell yeah,” he repeated. “I’ve seen your pod, it’s looking pretty, uh, streamlined.”

She chuckled. “It’s as banged up as me, but thanks.”

“I’m serious, though,” he said. “There’ll be a human in the top five eventually, and of all of us right now, I think it’ll be you.” Mag’s robotic heart started ticking much quicker- her brain was sending requests for the sort of alertness she had when podracing and her machinery was obliging. She guided their joined hands on top of her chest, and they lay there as her chest ratcheted up a couple centimetres, and then clicked down all at once. KJ hummed to the rhythm, starting quiet and getting louder til he cut off abruptly. He stopped when they both broke into giggles. They were still quite drunk.

“It’s getting kind of warm,” Mag said, reluctantly. KJ nodded, but he seemed reluctant as well. “We should be getting ready for the podrace. When is it, anyways? 50%?”

KJ nodded again. “Yup yup. When both suns are blazing across the middle of the sky.”

Slowly, an orange disc slid across the horizon into view. Everybody on Tatooine had seen it at some point or another, but it never stopped being a spectacular view.

Mag pushed up against the wall to get to her feet. She extended a hand down for KJ, but his eyes had drifted closed, and she realised he’d fallen asleep.

She shook him gently. “C’mon. C’mon, you gotta get up,” she said, as he mumbled back to consciousness. She offered her hand again, and this time he took it.

They both made their separate ways home. If you’d seen Magestrim then, you wouldn’t have guessed about the wires rustling under her light jacket, nor her several addictions, nor the extensive biohacking she’d done to her own body. She walked almost totally upright, her stoop gone. Her slow, aimless shuffle was replaced with brisk steps. Even her matted hair looked fine, in the slightly dim light of the second sunrise, and you could have mistaken her for any resident of the planet.

She walked with purpose to find her podracer, and even before she reached it, the same butterflies filled her chest as when she’d been with KJ-S. She sat in it and, with a couple of percentages to spare before she had to arrive, she relaxed into the cockpit. She fed the wires in her arm into the racer’s sensors and cameras. Her weaker eye, the right one, stopped transmitting to her brain, and a computer-augmented view replaced it.

Her heart ticked excitably, and she revved the engines. The podracer took off at a comfortable seventy miles per hour, and the wind rushed by her.

~~

The vehicles of the top three gleamed in the sunlight. When you were that good, your image could be just as important as your speed. Podracers usually paid the bills some other way, but the pros got sponsorships and relied on prize money. Mag fixed other vehicles for money, and KJ installed the cybernetics that Mag relied on to push her performance higher. Since the Coruscant Stock Exchange collapse a couple dozen years back, the outer rim had lost most of its access to anaesthetics, so KJ had done it on Mag unmedicated. But one of the first things the cybernetics removed for processing power was pain reception, so it had only hurt for the first hour.

The top ten non-humans were followed by a spate of more… functional vehicles. The six or seven humans that always competed, pretty much in vain, looked the worst of it. The desire to win, to be the next Anakin Skywalker, meant each tournament could count on a couple hundred credits of suckers’ money. They never won.

The race started in a few minutes, and Mag was wired, shaking with excitement as nutrients dripped into her blood and sparks arced through her fingertips.

The countdown began, and every racer, as one, leaned forwards. On one, forty racers slammed their accelerators down. The energy gate lifted just milliseconds before the fronts of the podracers would have slammed into it. Climbing from zero to sixty, eighty, one-twenty, one-sixty, two-hundred, the pods’ engines roared across the dusty track. Sabotage was technically allowed, but nowadays, the pods were so fast that you were more likely to hurt yourself than others. Still, Mag’s eyes scanned the people in front of her- she was in sixth place but dropping places slowly, and her HUD told her KJ was in twelfth. She could taste it. This time, humans would sweep the board, all of the top three at least. Her HUD showed her the route, which had been lengthened pretty much every race as pods got faster.

She tasted victory in the air of the track, yes, but in her private moments, Mag was not optimistic of humans’ long-term chances. They’d been going to more and more extreme lengths to compete, but as podracing got faster and faster, the advantages of the natural fitness many other species held were becoming crucial.

Humans were pretty bulky creatures, all things considered. They were good at _most_ things, but they weren’t really _brilliant_ at any of them- except drugs, they could drink pretty much anybody under the table. But that didn’t help for podracing.

Even if there was a next Anakin Skywalker, it could well be the last. If your pod only weighed twice as much as you do, the less you weigh, the better you’ll perform.

But those thoughts were snatched by the wind. Even the arid air of Tatooine seemed to be behind her today, urging her forward and snatching doubt away.

She stopped losing positions. A second later, she began to tick up. Tenth. Eighth. Sixth. By the last lap, she was up to fourth place. Her cybernetics were burning into her body with exertion, straining her into third.

Second glanced back in a move full of contempt- you wouldn’t do that if you remotely feared your competition could make up the ground between you. Its beady eyes found hers, and she felt a triumphant grin rise on her face as it quickly turned and put its energy back into the race.

Third place pushed back, and Magestrim made increasingly desperate movements to avoid them- one wrong bump and her pod could shock her to death, fall to bits, or disconnect from her inputs.

Third place pushed her further and further to the side, before letting off a burst of speed and edging ahead once again.

Magestrim growled, pushing everything she had into the race. Every fibre of her being burned on the altar of officially placing. She was so, _so_ close.

Fifth place suddenly felt like a slap in the face. She revved the engines, taking corners so dangerously that third place got out of her way out of sheer fear alone.

She inched forwards again, coming up on two. Her ambition didn’t temper in its success, it flared up at the added fuel. She _needed_ to be ahead of the racer ahead of her. It had disrespected her, and it wouldn’t be allowed to get away from that.

She screamed, mechanical lungs providing her with the breath to let out frustration at the sky. Faster drops. Tighter turns. Less margin for error. More aggressive racing. Her pod was not made for this- it warned her in high-pitched whines and insistent flashing lights, but she ignored them. She could make it.

She drew up to second place, and in a flash, she saw that her hatred of second place had been a mere distraction- she _had_ to win in first place. Humans wouldn’t _get_ this chance again.

She had given her life for this. She had given her _lungs_ for this. Her _heart_ and _soul_ melded to this machine that she loved. Any thought of KJ-S’s pretty smile, his wheezing giggle, they burned away as fuel, and he became another face in a crowd of humanity egging her on.

First place levelled up on front of her.

She pushed everything. She threw off her safety helmet- at this speed, it would hardly matter. She rammed her hands down on the accelerator, trying to make the metal understand what she needed of it. Something gave under her insistence, and the twenty metres between them- it felt like a hair’s breadth away at this speed- shortened. A metre crawled under her machine more than it did first place’s. And another. And another. She could outspeed him. She knew she could. But the line was right there, and this was taking too long. She shut off her life support, pouring everything into blind speed. The engines roared with triumph, and ate the metres between them. She drew level just as the engines returned to normal, and with a jolt, her vision- which had been greying and tunnelling in- popped back into focus. Her breathing restarted. Her mechanical heart started pumping again. Between one hydraulic push and another, mere microseconds apart, Magestrim watched as the two of them crossed the finish line together. It was too close to call.

Magestrim’s ambition curdled into pure anxiety. Had she done it? This was _It_. The last real chance humans had. Had she taken it?

She waited nervously for the verdict.

Soon, all the pods were lined up, people chatting nervously at the line.

KJ clambered out of his pod, and threw himself at Mag in a hug. “That was amazing!”

The pit of nervousness fell out of her stomach somewhat, and she giggled. “I am _good_ ,” she said, giving him a fist-bump, even as he leaned heavily against her, a look of- pride? adoration?- on his face as he stared up at her.

“Do you think you…” he asked, trailing off, nervous excitement bleeding into the silence.

“I... have no idea. I guess we’ll wait for the rankings?”

A few other human racers- in the same wear as Mag and KJ- came to congratulate her. She felt… famous. Her name would go down in history.

They watched the replay with bated breath. Watching her racer glide over the line in ultra-slow motion was more painful than the arcing. But it looked like… she was ahead. At the very least, it would be a draw. But it looked like she had-

The human faction erupted into cheers, and Mag felt a half-dozen people tugging at her or congratulating her. Her eyes pricked, with twin tracks of tears and cleansing solution running down her cheeks.

She’d done it.

“...And we’re just calling the results now,” came the voice of the announcer. “It’s been one hell of a race for humans, with placements across the board, much higher than last year.”

The buzz was electric.

The rankings came onto the board one at a time, reverse order. KJ came in at sixth, and Mag gave him a hug, seeing his eyes fill with tears. Then, fifth came in, and forth. The third place winner gave her a glare as their name appeared. The results continued to scroll slowly, almost glacially, upwards until the second place name came into view and

“Oh.”

The swelling cheers cut off in hundreds of throats, replaced with bemused silence. They’d _seen_ her pod. It had been ahead. Maybe not enough to _call_ , but surely enough for a _draw_.

“And an amazing turnout by Magestrim, the fastest human lap-time we have _ever_ seen on this track, faster even than the mythical Anakin Skywalker.”

First place gave her a smirk, already walking to the podium to take her spot.

“But that’s not right,” KJ said numbly. “You _won_. We all saw it.”

“I- I guess the booth disagrees,” someone said.

Mag turned, shakily, toward the booth. The director was staring right at her. And he did not look pleased. She stumbled towards the podium, the blazing suns suddenly abandoning her, leaving her cold and feverish. She made her way to the second place step.

First and third stood tall and proud. Second place was poorly filled. She looked scared, shabby, and confused.

The announcer boomed out across the speakers. “Esteemed viewers, this is the Boonta Eve Revival, and **this** has been podracing. Thank you, and good evening!”

**Author's Note:**

> this is probably more autobiographical than i meant it to be. i'm sad lmao


End file.
